Donating to software projects - or, more accurately, open source projects. It's hardly new, it's hardly rare, and I'm sure most of us have donated at some point. That's probably why Canonical has opened Ubuntu up for donations - but with a twist.

Just a thought, but maybe this is just a way to poll its userbase for direction, without making the poll easily crashable.

Interesting idea, except Shuttleworth and by extension Canonical have made it clear that they don't really care about what their users want. Over and over and over again. Consider how even with a monetary barrier to prevent trolls or manipulation they don't have any option which allows users to comment on whether they would like to see Unity go away or have an option allowing for MATE.

This latest furore over Amazon where Shuttleworth facetiously quipped about already having root on our machines was just the latest in a long chain of instances where they have disrespected their userbase and ignored any feedback to go ahead and do whatever they wanted to do from the start.